introtogenres - What did the Nazis do with the Dead Bodies?

An American soldier stands among the corpses of prisoners exhumed from a mass grave in a ravine near Nammering. On April 19, 1945, a freight train with nearly 4,500 prisoners from Buchenwald pulled onto the railroad siding at Nammering. Hundreds of prisoners who had died on the train were buried in the mass grave along with the prisoners who were forced to carry the corpses to the ravine and were then shot. Germany, ca. May 6, 1945.

They put a lot of the bodies into mass graves; some of the people were even alive when they did it. Doriane Kurz describes the scene of dead bodies being taken away “..there was a squadron of people that pulled this wagon around and came into the barracks and took the corpses, and then they would, two of them would take the corpse, one at the feet and one at the hands and they would toss them up to the top of the heap and that happened every day. I still have trouble with that.” (Kurz 8-13) When the Jewish people were sent to the concentration camps some were kept alive to work in the killing areas. They were in charge of burying the people that were killed in mass graves. Towards the end of the war the laborers were forced to exhume bodies and burn them. They also killed mentally and physically challenged people. When they died they were cremated without any care and sent to their families with a death certificate and a detailed description of their death.

After camp liberation, one of the mass graves at the Bergen-Belsen camp. Germany, after April 15, 1945.